On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 11:20:44AM +0100, Jens Bladt wrote: > IMO Auto modes - especially programmet AE - never worked well with Pentax > cameras and a flash. > The camera will just set the shutter speed and aperture as if there was no > flash attatched!
That's exactly contrary to my experience with the PZ-1p and AF500. Admittedly that's the best camera/flash combination I've seen from Pentax (I haven't used the K10D/540 enough to evaluate them). But on the PZ-1p it would balance the ambient and flash exposure to give the right exposure in every situation from bright California sunshine (where the flash contribution was just fill flash) to dark interiors (totally lit by the flash). The situation that impressed me the most was shooting inside an exhibition tent during the daytime, where it did indeed set the shutter speed close to what would have been chosen with no flash (thus only slightly under-exposing the background), and balanced this with quenching the flash to correctly expose the foreground objects. In my opinion this is precisely the right thing for the camera to do, and not something to complain about. In the absence of any additional user input I'm much happier with a camera that tries to produce an image that shows detail across the frame. The foreground objects are going to be illuminated principally by the flash, no matter what you do; that illumination will be controlled by quenching the flash when it has provided enough light. It's only the distant objects where the ambient light is the primary illumination, so exposing for those will indeed end up with settings similar to those without any flash. Short of repealing the laws of physics, I don't know what else you would expect. You can, of course, bias the camera to provide more or less flash output (by one to two stops). Using this in combination with exposure compensation allows you to control the exposure to get just about any effect you desire. But if you use it in full automatic it will try to avoid both overexposure of the foreground objects and underexposure of distant objects. Complaining about this is about as sensible as complaining that using the camera in full-automatic green mode doesn't provide the amount of motion blur (or depth of field, or shadow detail, or ...) that you wanted. There's a simple solution; use the tools and adjustments provided, rather than relying on the camera to do your thinking for you. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
